


This Desert Life

by Glinda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-24 02:07:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8352103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Furiosa makes Toast feel complicated things. She wants to be like her, to be strong and brave and free, to fight by her side and find the Green Place. But sometimes she wants other things too.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tamaraface](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamaraface/gifts).



Toast remembers a life before the citadel. A life on the road and the family that she travelled with. It was a hard life and a dangerous one, but it was free in its way and she never doubted that she was loved. She doesn’t remember anyone ever telling her that, but she knew all the same. They weren’t big talkers in her family but it was there in their actions. She remembers when she wasn’t called Toast, when she had another name. She was always a variation of The Knowing One, a clever, watchful child, quick to learn with nimble fingers and a sharp tongue. Toast has value now, like a useful tool or resource, but she was valued long before that. 

Her parents were pragmatists, well aware of Immortan Joe’s predilection for acquiring breeders. They often passed through the Citadel to trade and they made sure to keep their daughters’ hair short and dress them in boys clothes whenever they did. Toast doesn’t know what it was that caught Joe’s attention on that particular trip. Perhaps it was fate or chance, perhaps someone else tipped him off to save their own daughter. Whatever the cause, by the end of the day, half her family are dead, the rest have fled and her new home is a vault full of other girls. 

Joe claims to love her a few times, early on, when he’s first taken her as his wife. If he thinks kindness will break her when beatings have not, then he is sorely mistaken. Toast has learned by then, not to talk back, not to spit defiance and mockery back in his face. But while she can silence her tongue, her eyes are a different matter, mocking he calls them, too knowing by half he accuses. Accusing, Miss Giddy tells her as she patches Toast up, a reminder of all his sins. 

There is a story that Miss Giddy tells the Wives, time and again, whenever one of them wishes themselves barren or ponders other solutions. She doesn’t tell them about their former sisters, who were lost in childbirth – whether to spare them or herself is unclear, Miss Giddy wears those losses like a heavy coat of grief – but instead of a former favourite of Joe’s. A beautiful girl, strong-willed and defiant; taken as a wife after a raiding party over 6000 days before. She’d been Joe’s favourite for a while and he’d tolerated her spirit, had even enjoyed it. 

Until the day it became clear that she would never bear him children, that her womb was as barren as the desert that he’d stolen her from. Perhaps if she’d been sweet and obedient, he would have allowed her to stay, to give him pleasure if she could not give him children. But she was not, she mocked him and fought him and ever sought to escape him. (She was the reason, Miss Giddy insisted, that the Wives were never allowed out of their vault.) So she was cast down. To scramble in the dirt at the foot of the citadel. But, ever defiant, not even that had cowed her, and she’d fled into the dessert, in a fruitless attempt to return to her old people. Stealing bikes and once a lancer, only to be dragged back to the citadel. Eventually Joe was _forced_ to cut off her right hand to stop her stealing them – to brand her so anyone who found her would know she was still his property. It was intended as a cautionary tale. But Toast, who watches people so carefully, hears the regret in Miss Giddy’s voice, an odd hollowness that spoke of having lost hope for a different, better ending to the story. 

Toast dreams of this long gone wife. Of the beautiful woman, defiant and unbroken, trying again and again to escape from the Citadel. Dreams of running away with her, of shooting at their enemies with a really big gun while this other wife – with her unlikely name – drives them to freedom. Of tracking down their families or just of getting far enough away that no man, least of all Joe, will ever lay a finger on either of them. 

There is another story these days in the Citadel. Of a woman who has risen from black thumb, to driver, all the way up to Imperator. She is brutal and merciless they say. They call her Imperator Furiosa, and Joe trusts her more than any of his lieutenants that aren’t actually blood kin. The one time that the Citadel comes under direct attack in the years that Toast has lived there, it is Furiosa he sends to guard the Wives. An Imperator that he can trust not to steal his wives. To Toast’s eyes Furiosa has always looked defiant and indestructible, her shaved head, vicious brand and artificial arm make her look like she could survive anything the world could throw at her, as though she already had. 

Yet standing in the vault with them, she looks oddly small, oddly fragile, at least to Toast. The others flutter and fuss around her, fascination overcoming fear to pepper her with questions and show her odd treasures. Miss Giddy though is silent and so very still, she and Furiosa stare at each other assessing and tense. When Miss Giddy speaks, it is only one word, the name of a long-dead myth. 

“No,” Furiosa tells her, “that woman died in the mud. Hers was a Citadel name. I was not born here, I was brought here from the Green Place and there they called me Furiosa. You may call me Furiosa or Imperator, I answer to no other names.”

The other wives have drawn back from her, but this merely allows space to let Miss Giddy move closer, to stand looking up at this tall, terrifying, beautiful woman. A smile breaks over Miss Giddy’s face and she nods satisfaction.

“Welcome to the vault Furiosa, its good to see you again, its been too long since you last graced us with your presence. He always did have a blindspot when it came to you.”

“Long may that continue,” Furiosa agrees. 

(“What happened to her?” Cheedo will ask not long after she joins them. “She got a divorce,” they tell her only half-joking. They never told her that Joe didn’t realise who Furiosa was, that he saw his former wife almost every day and didn’t recognise or remember her. That she was a talisman for how little he truly cared for them. That he could be fooled by shaving your head and reclaiming your former name. What she didn’t know, she couldn’t betray, but mostly Cheedo just saw it as an extension of his great benevolence.)

~

Furiosa makes Toast feel complicated things. She wants to be like her, to be strong and brave and free, to fight by her side and find the Green Place. But sometimes she wants other things too.

Furiosa thinks that Toast already is all those things and would not be remotely adverse to doing any of those other things with her too. Just as soon as Toast comes to terms with the crush that makes her sulky and contrary and generally makes Furiosa want turn her upside down and tickle her as she would the younger children back in the Green Place. She thinks Toast would fit just fine into Vulvini culture, though she can’t bring herself to tell her that, its something she can’t promise her, and more importantly needs to be something Toast chooses for herself.


End file.
